The Problem

So we say that we get a brand new hardware with 4-8-16 ethernet cards, 600mhz cpu, a nice RAM and hdd. Now we want to install on it some firewall based distribution and manage the installation process.

Installing the software on our firewall HDD

The best way is to attach the firewall hdd, on our pc – free hdd slot and linux will automatically recognise the hard-disk, or wee can use a CF writer (Compact Flash) First we download the image (.img) with wget, or curl , or your browser. Normally we will find a .img.tar.gz file , first we tar -xzvf the file and than we copy our image to the firewall hdd. We assume that the hard-disk is located at /dev/sdb (/dev/sdb1) Than:

dd if=/home/user/downoads/our_img_distro.img of=/dev/sdb

if stands for input file, and of stands for output file.

Or we directly:

 tar -xzvf /location/our_img_firewall_distro.img.tar.gz | of=/dev/sdb

This requires a boot-able operating system image. You cant just copy files to the Flash card because it needs a boot sector. dd does a byte-by-byte copy, including the boot sector, which most other copy commands cannot do.

Minicom at work

Now we re-attached the hard-disk on our hardware firewall, and want to check the installation. We need:

• Minicom (software) installed on our Linux-box
• A null-modem serial cable(if you don’t know what I mean, search google images with “null-modem serial cable”

Than we fix the serial cable and start minicom with:

[root@mybox]# minicom -s  [s stands for setup]
------[configuration]-------
| Filenames and paths
| File transfer protocols
| Serial port setup
| Modem and dialing
| Screen and keyboard
| Save setup as dfl
| Save setup as..
| Exit
| Exit from Minicom
----------------------------

Than we go to serial-port-setup and hit [enter]

-------------------------------------------
| A -     Serial Device     : /dev/tty8
| B - Lockfile Location     : /var/lock
| C -    Callin Program     :
| D - Callout Program       :
| E -     Bps/Par/Bits      : 19200 8N1
| F - Hardware Flow Control : No
| G - Software Flow Control : No
|
|     Change which setting?
-------------------------------------------

Now , if the A -option (serial device) is not /dev/ttyS0 (which is normally our normal working port) we hit Shift+A and change it to /dev/ttyS0 Than we change the E /Bps/Par/Bits in the same way. What’s the right setting? This have to do with what are you using as hardware, but normally you get this information form the website of the firewall company.
Now we have attached our minicom and we’r reddy for a fresh new installation. Start up the firewall and if it’s all right we will see the booting information on our terminal. (just like we have a monitor and are booting our software) If we have different firewall box’s and don’t want to repeate configurations we just “Save setup as…” and than chose a name for our configuration like efw, ipcop, etc and than for connecting directly with that we just:

minicom ipcop

On the old times this cable was the “T1″ of today lol.